OK, it took me forever to finish The Casual Vacancy. I probably should have liked it—I know almost all of my friends did—but I just couldn’t with the Little Britain mentality and Middle England class warfare antics that J.K. Rowling describes with such unvarnished authenticity. Having lived in England for a few years, I found the petty, mean-spirited antics of the main characters to be just too real to make this an enjoyable read. Mrs Smith Reads The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
How ’bout we just keep this particular Circle broken?
I read The Circle back in August while on a family vacation in San Francisco/Silicon Valley. Needless to say this made Dave Egger’s exploration of life and culture in a dystopian, data-centric near-future all the more depressing. Mae Holland is thrilled when a good friend from college recruits her to come to work at The Circle. Mae starts at the bottom, as a call center customer service rep who fields calls from world-wide clients to help make sure their experience of Circle products and services […]
In 1866, the South Island of New Zealand was the hottest frontier for those who wanted to find their fortunes in the unexplored territories of the Southern Hemisphere. The California gold fields were mostly played out, so Europeans who had missed the opportunities of the fledgling West of America were booking passage to Dunedin, then on to Hokitika for a chance to strike it rich in the newly discovered gold fields. This exotic and diverse world becomes the setting for Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize winning, expansive novel The […]
How Hannibal Became a Cannibal
Having never read Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris, when it was published in 2007, I thought I would go back and finish up the series, mostly to familiarize myself with the entire Hannibal cannon and potentially to help me have more information at hand as the television series continues in 2015. The reviews for the book when it came out, were not kind, and many thought Harris had crossed a line in the sand by establishing his imagined reasons for Hannibal Lecter’s childhood trauma and resulting descent […]